Recipes as Records

I have been working on a very different records project for the past several weeks.  This one is personal, and it's anything but low-fat.  When my mother passed away this spring, she left behind a collection of several hundred recipes.  While most were clipped from the paper or saved from a magazine, some were family originals and favorites made for birthdays, bake sales, and community suppers spanning over 100 years.  To honor my mother and share that history with the family, I compiled a cookbook with scans of the handwritten gems and photos of the people who created them.  As I was putting the book together, I realized how closely basic records management concepts apply, even in the kitchen: 

Creation and Capture

Some recipes were carefully and neatly recorded.  Some were incorporated into letters.  Others were scribbled in pencil on the back of any handy scrap of paper.  As with other records, if the recipe isn't written down, it's lost.  The cookbook I compiled was full of cookies, pies, jams, pickles, and other county fair staples.  Missing were recipes for many of the classic, most-loved main dishes.  Those existed only in the memories and hands of the women who made them, and without the records, they are lost.  It's easy to see how that happened.  After all, how do you quantify a pinch of this added to a bit of that, stirred until the mixture feels about right and cooked until it looks done?  As with any other records project, capturing the information takes effort, but it could be the most enjoyable knowledge preservation program you've ever undertaken.

Maintenance and Use

My mother's recipe collection was arranged in a way that made sense to her.  There was a basic organizational scheme - food type, followed by title, mostly - but she had several different treasure troves of recipes, and the system required you to search in each of the different collections.  There was no file plan or inventory and no single central file, and while I wouldn't have expected one, it does make me doubt that I found them all.  The system seemed to work for her most of the time, but like so many other filing systems, you had to be the owner to understand it, and I'm sure even she didn't truly know exactly what she had.  

Access and Metadata

As I scanned each recipe, there were choices to make.  When Marguerite's White Princess Cake has its title amended to make it "Orange Princess Cake," which title wins?  Do I put all the biscuit recipes together or leave them sorted by title with the rest of the breads?  Version control is also an issue, but in this case, the adjustments to the measurements and the side notes ("from radio - good," "If you want a dressing, this is what we used") add more charm than challenge.  The commentary itself adds to the record.  Many are marked "good" and "very good," and one cake is even "splendid" while another is a "whoppin' big, smacking good cake." Some made me wish for more metadata.  I can guess by the handwriting which cook wrote down which recipe, but it's a guess.  Some are complete mysteries.  Who were the buddies behind "Buddies Delight," and why was it an old favorite?  What sparked the political commentary added to this fruitcake recipe?  Without the context, we miss part of the story.

Context, Content, and Structure

I considered retyping the recipes to make them easier to read, but I quickly rejected that idea.  The text alone loses the sense of the cook.  Was the recipe jotted down, typed, or written carefully in ink?  Is it a brief note of the ingredients and proportions scrawled on the back of an old advertisement or a complete list of all the steps on a decorative recipe card?  The notes added in pencil along the side of the card give us a sense of the cook's process, and the well-worn cards tell us which recipes were used most often.  One recipe was written on the back of a sheet of letterhead from the general store run by the family in the first half of the 1900s.  I often teach that things like blank forms and letterhead are nonrecords, but in this case, the record medium itself is also evidence that reinforces the family stories.  

Technology Change

I have to admit that I don't use 3x5 cards for my own recipes.  I tend to have printouts scribbled with my changes and notes, and if I need a recipe for something, I Google it rather than starting from scratch.  I have family recipes for mayonnaise and pickles, but I'm more likely to drive to the store to buy those things.  With a thousand angel food cake recipes out on the Web, will the next generation care about the four or five variations handed down through the family?  I'm also seeing change within the recipes themselves.  Many of them call for a "moderate" or a "slow" oven - settings my oven's digital temperature readout won't recognize - and one of my favorite recipes calls for two 15-cent bars of chocolate.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

I read an article a few months ago that mourned the loss of so many family recipe collections to disasters like Hurricane Katrina.  Our own collection was almost lost when a family member, intent on cleaning things out, tossed over half the collection without a second thought.  There were no backup copies, and the most precious recipes - handwritten history passed down through five generations - were mixed in with clippings from magazines and the local paper.  To the untrained (or unsentimental or takeout-oriented) eye, they were junk to be discarded.  To me, they were family stories told in 3x5 card form.  Without backups, and without a records schedule or plan, the first responder on the scene had no idea of their value.  I managed to save them at the last minute, but as records managers know, good planning beats pure luck every time.  In this case, duplication and dispersal is my strategy of choice, and printed and electronic copies of the cookbook are on their way to family members across the country.

My next challenge is to find the best way to protect and care for the originals.  I'm sure my day job has influenced the way I look at the photographs, notes, family history research and recipes now in my care, and I hope I can do them justice.  Sometimes our day jobs don't stop when we leave work.    The story of our communities, our companies, our families and our country is told through our records.  We can use what we know to preserve and share that history, even if it's one dish at a time.

Comments

[S]

I really enjoyed this post. I'm sure there are many others families out there with similar records that need to be preserved.

This almost sounds like a workshop that could be planned and presented, maybe through a local historical society? People should be thinking beyond photographs and diaries as the written records of their families.

[Amanda]

This is a lovely post. I was given my grandmother's recipe cuttings earlier this year. You're making me think I ought to do something about them (although unlike your mother, my gran was a terrible cook, so there's slightly less incentive!). I think what you've done with the collection sounds fantastic: good for you.

[Fay]

Very nice! I love this -
Is a book available?
I'm an artist based in San Francisco and stumbled onto your post searching for hand-written recipes to incorporate into my digital portraits. You could say that I make records of faces! If possible, I would love permission to use your recipes, and perhaps offer some sort of collaboration in return - Here is an example:
http://www.imagekind.com/Alfred-Hitchcock_art?IMID=f89e7b36-0ef3-4f8d-a152-1a92d0e1f1a7
If you are interested, please email me! helfay@gmail.com